A Chinese Robocall Scam Randomly Targets Immigrants’ Political Fears

A recent scam preys not on an immigrant’s sense of trust but on uncertainties about a politically perplexing present.

Photograph by Tom Stoddart / Getty

The call came at four o’clock on an icy March morning. It was from Zhen, my mother’s Chinese health aide. My mother, who has A.L.S., lives in a long-term hospital, and her medical emergencies do not tend to observe regular hours. “She’s O.K.,” Zhen quickly told me in Chinese, by way of a greeting, as I fumbled to sit up in the dark. Then her voice trailed off, embarrassed, before she tentatively began to explain why she was calling. “The Chinese Embassy called me today,” she said. “And I think I may be in trouble.”

Zhen, who is in her early fifties, cares for my mother two nights a week, and works two other jobs; she is a clerk at a Chinese grocery and cares for an elderly woman. Two days earlier, someone had called her, speaking in Mandarin and claiming to be from the Embassy, and asked her to transfer money from her bank account to “an official account,” in order to pick up “a very important document that may impact her legal status.” During her shift at my mother’s hospital, the person called again and warned her that, if she ignored her “final notice” to transfer the money, she may be subject to arrest the next time she travelled to China; Zhen had bought tickets for a trip to Fuzhou the following month. “I’m very sorry to wake you,” she told me, but she had to get to her travel agency, in case she needed to cancel her trip, before she started work at the grocery, and she wanted to consult with me, the only English speaker she knows, before finishing her night shift.

I confess to a moment of relief that Zhen’s emergency did not involve my mother. But, after collecting myself, I did a quick, bleary-eyed search online. The call, of course, is part of a scam that has been directed recently at many New Yorkers, both Chinese and non-Chinese. The non-Chinese speakers generally just hang up, but, according to WNYC, since December, at least twenty-one Chinese immigrants, ranging in age from twenty-one to sixty-five, have been swindled out of two and a half million dollars, though the police report that many cases likely go unreported. The scam is thought to originate in mainland China, where an app disguises the caller I.D. with the local New York area code 212.

In a variation on the scam, as WNYC reported, a woman in her sixties who lives in Flushing—home to a large Chinese community from the mainland—told the N.Y.P.D that she had received a call from someone claiming to be a law-enforcement agent in Beijing. The caller said that the Chinese police had arrested a Chinese-American man suspected of money laundering; he was found carrying stolen bank cards into China, one of which was hers. The caller told the woman that, to protect her assets, she needed to transfer her money from her American bank account to one ostensibly set up by the police. The woman said that she paid out $1.3 million, in what would be the biggest fraud reported thus far.

Last fall, I reported a story on a Chinatown scam in which scammers travelled from China to specifically target immigrants of their own cultural background. The scheme, known as a “blessing scam,” is typically orchestrated by multiple actors. They accost a target, convincingly spin a story about a supernatural omen—such as, a vengeful ghost has placed a curse on a family member and it can only be broken after the target presents the sum total of her valuables. The woman I spoke to for the story, a Chinese home-health aide from Bensonhurst, was robbed of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Immigrant fraud is so prevalent in New York that, in 2014, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office established a special unit to investigate and prosecute such crimes. When I spoke to the D.A.’s office in the fall, all but one of the cases that the unit has handled had involved perpetrators who share the ethnic background of their victims. A shared culture and upbringing usually breed trust and intimacy among people who are far from home, but, in the age of globalization, trust has become weaponized.

The embassy scam, however, preys not on an immigrant’s sense of trust but on her uncertainties about a politically perplexing present. Zhen follows the Chinese media on topics such as President Trump’s growing hostility toward immigrants and China’s increasing skepticism of the West. In widely publicized operations named “Fox Hunt” and “Sky Net,” President Xi Jinping has launched comprehensive anti-corruption drives to repatriate officials accused of financial crimes. If China is capable of chasing down suspected fugitives in the United States, who can say whether it’s safe to refuse calls from someone claiming to be acting on its behalf? And who’s to know whether the U.S. government would now protect an immigrant’s rights in such situations?

What’s particularly remarkable about the current scheme is the size of its net; my non-Chinese-speaking editor and some other colleagues have received the calls, which have also been reported in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The scammers, rather than expending the energy to target their victims, seem to think that they can randomly approach vast numbers of people and that enough of them will be sufficiently confused about their rights to walk right into the trap.

Zhen told me that she didn’t think that the scammers could be scammers, because “they said they were calling to protect me from a scam.” She laughed a dry laugh. “Who mentions fraud while trying to carry out a fraud?” This is another timely facet of the embassy scam: the way in which it has adapted to and absorbed not only the current political climate but also the newfound anxieties surrounding cybersecurity and individual privacy, and used them against its victims.

A few days ago, Zhen called me again, this time from a hospital phone. The caller I.D. set my heart pounding, but I calmed down when Zhen said, “Sorry, my cell phone is dead,” before telling me that my mother wanted me to get new batteries for her bedside clock. That evening, when I arrived at the hospital, Zhen played me an old voice mail on her phone, in English, telling her that, if she did not pay her phone bill immediately, her service would be cut off. “I think this message is about my bill,” she said. “But, when I got it, I thought maybe this woman was just trying to sell me something,” she told me.

Zhen’s phone service had been disconnected a few times in the past year, and I suggested that she enroll in auto payment, so she doesn’t have to worry about remembering to pay the bills. “You mean someone just goes into my bank account and takes the money?” she asked. As I tried to explain that only she could authorize a payment, I realized how preposterous the suggestion must have sounded to her. There is too much uncertainty within such a system, and too many ways that it demands a trust that Zhen can no longer comfortably give.